Powercolor announces Radeon R9 290 OC

Powercolor has added yet another graphics card to its new Radeon R9 lineup, the Powercolor R9 290 OC. Based on the same Hawaii GPU behind the flagship R9 290X, the Powercolor R9 290 packs quite a decent punch while being quite cheaper than the Radeon R9 290X.

As noted, the Powercolor R9 290 OC is based on AMD's latest Hawaii GPU with 2560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs and same 512-bit memory interface paired up with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. It works at 975MHz for the maximum GPU clock, which is around 30MHz (27MHz to be precise) higher than the reference design, while memory ended up clocked at standard 1250MHz (5.0GHz effective).

Although it did not change anything regarding the cooler or the PCB design, it is still nice to see that Powercolor is confident enough to raise the GPU clock, at least for a mere 30MHz. As expected, the new R9 290 OC supports AMD TrueAudio, Mantle API, and all other features already seen on the Radeon R9 290X graphics card and also comes with two DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.

As announced today, the price for the R9 290 is set at US $399.00 ex. VAT which is a good US $150 less than the Radeon R9 290X and we are sure that Powercolor will not charge extra for the minor factory-overclock but use it as a way to differentiate from the competition.